Teaching Assistants Also Consider Strike Symbolic

They are not the kind of people who normally carry picket signs--people such as Eugenia Sandaval, a 20-year-old college student; Jesus Tinoco, a 35-year-old Venezuelan who was a shop clerk in his native country, and Luis Villarreal, a former worker in an upholstery factory. Yet, they have embarked on a work stoppage with challenging cultural and educational implications.

They are among hundreds of striking Los Angeles Unified School District teaching assistants, many of whom see their 6-day-old strike for a union contract in starkly personal terms.

The majority of the district’s 10,000 teaching assistants are first-generation Latino immigrants. They tend to interpret the strike--especially its demand for medical insurance and guaranteed minimum hours--as a symbolic question of whether they will improve on the lives of their immigrant parents.

“I know the struggles my family went through,” said Gonzalo Ramirez, 19, a teaching assistant at 102nd Street Elementary School in Watts, who picketed in front of Manual Arts High School at a strike rally Monday morning.

Ramirez’s mother, a Mexican immigrant, works for minimum wage at a restaurant. He takes college courses and hopes after graduating to become a high school math teacher. The effort to win a labor contract, he said, is “my chance to show them that this is the generation that can do something other than work at a restaurant.”

This determination--expressed last week when 150 teaching assistants noisily demonstrated during a school board meeting and then occupied board members’ chairs after the board fled--is forcing the district to confront an important long-range choice: Should the teaching assistants, who receive no health benefits, sick leave or paid holidays, be kept in their current status--treated, in effect, like the average American part-time worker? Or should they be upgraded to paraprofessional status because of the classroom work they do and because a significant proportion say they want to become teachers?

Because 70% are bilingual Latinas, those with aspirations to become educators represent the kind of teachers sorely lacking in the district, which has only one certified bilingual instructor for every 400 non-English-speaking students.

“The TAs can be a solution to the entire school problem,” said Carlos Barron, a bilingual teaching consultant in the district’s professional development office and a supporter of the strike. “If they (board members) want to solve the (bilingual education) problem, they shouldn’t throw away an opportunity.”

The key issues are demands for a guaranteed minimum workday of four hours, health benefits and a “career ladder” that would raise wages by 5% for teaching assistants who take a sufficient number of college courses. Wages currently run $8 to $10 an hour.

The board has resisted the demands, contending they are too expensive. The district has so far refused to guarantee hours and is willing only to pay half of the health benefits for those who work four hours or more a day. The district wants to retain a longstanding--but not always enforced--requirement that they attend college in their spare time, something the union wants to abolish.

The union, Local 99 of the Service Employees International Union, acknowledges that its demands would cost the financially troubled district an extra $14 million over the next two years.

Local 99, which organized the teaching assistants last year, on Monday orchestrated walkouts at 117 schools in South Los Angeles, West Los Angeles and the San Pedro-Wilmington area. The union is calling a series of “rolling” strikes, in which assistants strike in various areas for three days at a time.

As usual, the two sides gave wildly conflicting estimates of strike participation on Monday. The district said only 265 assistants were missing; the union said 1,200--about 80% of the assistants at the 117 schools--were on strike.

Another round of negotiations is scheduled today.

The dispute carries a significance beyond the teaching assistants themselves. Organized labor, its national membership rapidly sinking as a percentage of the total work force, is relying heavily on organizing categories of workers who have rarely joined unions in the past. The assistants--a part-time, heavily female, largely minority work force--are an example of that kind of worker.

The fact that the assistants receive no medical benefits is not unusual among part-time workers, defined by federal standards as people who work fewer than 35 hours a week. Many teaching assistants stay with the job because it pays exceptionally well--nearly twice what the average part-time job in the United States pays.

But that was no consolation to those who gathered at Monday’s rally.

“I get sick and I don’t go to a doctor,” said Villarreal, 27, of Downey, who was encouraged to quit working in upholstery and become a teaching assistant seven years ago by his sister, who also was a teaching assistant. “What I do, I use home remedies and hope I get well.”

William Ganuza, 24, who came to the United States from El Salvador with his parents at age 10, said his family has promised to help support him while he is on strike.

“We have nothing to lose; they can fire us now anyway. But we have a lot to gain. That’s why it wasn’t a difficult decision for me to make,” he said.